Free copy of windows 7? That seems a little fishy.

An Original Name wrote:
Free copy of windows 7? That seems a little fishy.

The key is the only important part, the media can be downloading freely without penalty.

An Original Name wrote:
Free copy of windows 7? That seems a little fishy.

choose to burn the Windows 7 ISO file (freely-downloadable from DigitalRiver) matching the version that shipped with your laptop to DVD

... what part of the above are you not understanding exactly?

Thanks dstrakele, that explains the missing 25 GB. Checked Disk Manager and there it was.

Thanks to everyone else as well for your input. A good amount of useful information that will certainly aid me in my endeavors to turn this into my new 3D workstation.


I'm actually moving over from a similar spec'd desktop because I just want to be mobile. It is an i5 2500k, 8 GB RAM, and 560 Ti build of mine. Performance is identical to the laptop for the most part, but funny enough, the laptop runs cooler. Must be the new CPU/GPU architectures and of course because they are made with being mobile in mind. Certainly nice, and fits the bill as a desktop replacement. Being able to run 4 monitors without SLI is fantastic as well. Three monitors now to do work with... will boost productivity most definitely. Soon I may get a monitor that has display port functionality.

The freedom to do my work and have everything available to me wherever I wish to go is excellent. I had used the SSD for the desktop initially, and I am happy it works for laptops as well.

There is a strange disparity I cannot explain though. I've shown all hidden files and folders, selected everything in my C drive, and it says the folders take up 24 GB. Now, I currently have 86 GB total showing up, total, for the drive. It says I only have 50 GB free. 12 GB is unaccounted for, and that is just confusing.

UltimaRage wrote:

There is a strange disparity I cannot explain though. I've shown all hidden files and folders, selected everything in my C drive, and it says the folders take up 24 GB. Now, I currently have 86 GB total showing up, total, for the drive. It says I only have 50 GB free. 12 GB is unaccounted for, and that is just confusing.

I had the same issue. It is because if you reinstall from the recoverydiscs, the SSD is automatically formatted in GPT instead of MBR. It creates additional partitions on the disk that are not visible. To get rid of it, I did as suggested in this thread also - downloaded a free (legal) win7 installation, re-formatted the whole drive again in MBR and used the product key to activate it.

Problem number 2 arose when I added the old HDD to the setup - it still had the original installation and was still formatted GPT. Every time I booted the machine it opted to boot from the old HDD instead of the SSD no matter what I did in BIOS (removed the boot option, but it got automatically added every goddam time). Had to re-format the whole HDD into MBR as well, and after that it has behaved.

Looks like a truly fresh install is my only recourse. I'm almost tempted not to do it for now, though. It's time to get an external HDD so I don't have to continue to transfer files from one computer to another it seems.